I’ve been using Aweber for the newsletters on a few of my websites for quite a while and like it for a number of reasons. I don’t pay for any traffic to those sites, and my lists are building slowly. I happened across a post on Facebook recently (and can’t even remember how!) where they were talking about using Lightboxes. I started investigating and discovered that the Lightbox option is where you get a pop up of sorts that isn’t really a pop up asking if you want to sign up for a newsletter. I had mixed feelings about implementing it but have been pleasantly surprised so far.
Here’s a chart that shows daily signups over the course of a month. It’s easy to see when I implemented the Lightbox:
The blue show people who unsubscribed (luckily not many!). Green are people who subscribed and verified their subscriptions. Yellow are those who subscribed but did not verify. I can understand why the yellow increased so much. Some people just entered an email address in the box to get it to close rather than hitting the “close” button. However, you can see that my verified subscriptions have tripled. Interestingly, this is from a site that actually has much less traffic now than it did in December, and the December subscription numbers were consistent with those first eight days shown in the chart.
Clearly I am getting more newsletter signups. However, there are two potential downsides. First, are people hitting the back button on the site after the Lightbox pops up? I have it set to a delay so that they will find the content and start reading before the Lightbox pops up. Conversions on merchandise are definitely down a little bit, but it is also not a month in which I would expect to see high conversions. The second issue is the number of people “complaining” about the newsletters. My “complaints” (which can be defined as many different things in Aweber) have gone up from about .08% to .24% this month. Could it be that people are signing up just to close the box but then also verifying and not really wanting the newsletter? That seems odd, but possible.
I’ll be continuing to watch the trends over the next month or so regarding newsletter signups, site visits, and merchandise conversion rates. The one thing that I want to stress is how easy it was to create the Lightbox in Aweber, including modifying the template as well as the appearance itself. Next up I will be doing some A/B testing on Lightbox differences (graphic v. text).
{ 8 comments… read them below or add one }
Wow – that’s amazing. I have to try this out on my site. My only question is… why don’t you have Aweber linked, as an affiliate? They pay lifetime recurring! If you’re providing quality tips like this, you should be earning off them, too
Eric Nagel´s last blog ..Tracking ShareASale Commissions with Prosper202
Thanks, Eric! Strangely, I had never even thought of joining their affiliate program. I’ll have to go do that right now. Terrific suggestion!
I have had the same internal struggle! I still doubt my decision, but results are results I suppose. I have mine set up that the visitor will only see the lightbox on their first visit so it doesn’t appear so spammy. I don’t see people double opting in on accident. I do think that you will get more signups from those who are ‘iffy’ about your site, that could explain the increase in complaint percentage.
Nate´s last blog ..CoffeeNate #27 :: CoffeeNate on Tim Hortons
I’m with you, Nathan. I *think* I have it set up to only appear to them once. I also tried to make it so that the “close box” option was pretty obvious. I don’t want people signing up if they don’t want it. On the other hand, I noticed that I personally was signing up for newsletters more often when a box popped up to prompt me.
I’m going to be implementing AWeber on the Geek Dads Weekly site this week, and I’m very interested in the effectiveness of the lightbox. I’ve always been personally turned off by them, but if they work, I’ll put that aside and use one.
Daniel M. Clark´s last blog ..Affiliate Summit West 2010 Recap
I’ll be interested to see how you like it, Daniel!
I’m curious, Tricia, do you use the javascript code, or the HTML code? (with the light box option in aweber)
PandaMarketer´s last blog ..Affiliate Summit Podcast — Likes and dislikes
@David I’m using the javascript option for all of my aweber boxes.